


suffer a sea-change

by toujours_nigel



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:36:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3962926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>sort of an outtake from restless nights in one-night cheap hotels</p>
    </blockquote>





	suffer a sea-change

**Author's Note:**

> sort of an outtake from restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

“That boy,” said Peter after they had retired to their cabin, “has a terrible face for secrets.”

Harriet, busily divesting herself of the feminine odds and ends that propriety dictated had to be trundled to dinner even on the whale-road, frowned a little over the clasp of her pearls, and said, “I was thinking just the opposite. He’s got a face like a coffer, one of those great Victorian things that you can barely wedge open even with the key.”

“Perpetually threatening to slam down on the fingers, style of thing,” Peter agreed, and toed off his shoes. Bunter would have paled, but Bunter had been sent ahead with the trunks and orders to make Talboys inhabitable and it made Peter behave, Harriet found, rather like a truant schoolboy. “But you can see, don’t you see, that he _has_ a secret. Terrible face.”

“I think it adds something. Rather a thin, ascetic sort of face, otherwise.” said my lady, who had a predilection for thin ascetic faces, even ones that contrived on occasion to look rather foolish. “Peter, you must get Saint-George to stop heckling him. It’s not fair, the poor boy can’t fight back.”

“Shackled to duty,” his lordship said, and coming up bent his head to the slope of my lady’s shoulder. “I try not to make a habit of telling Jerry anything, but for your admirer I shall make an exception.”

Harriet, mouth stopped with a kiss, had enough time think _My admirer!_ in a scoffing tone, and then for a while nothing of anyone but them.

 

Peter was good enough to drop a word in the morning, though whether in his nephew’s ear or the rather more willing one of the purser Harriet could not undertake to say, and for the next two nights Saint-George seethed over dinner like a tiger balked of prey. It was all rather like watching a small boy torment his little brother, except of course telling Peter as much had brought on an immediate torrent of appalling speculation about Denver and nearly as appalling theories over the next few days about The Secret Of The Terrible Face, with illegitimacy leading the pack, followed by alcoholism, gambling debts, and bigamy, though in that last he admitted he was resorting to sad clichés unworthy of them both. Harriet thought it passing strange that homosexuality hadn’t entered the lists for certainly there was more than simple dislike in the narrow looks thrown at Saint-George’s oblivious back, but perhaps Peter was limiting himself to unprovable claims.

“Jerry’s gone awful patriotic,” Peter said contemplatively on the last morning, with the white cliffs toy-sized in the distance. “Never was a very good sailor. Here comes your gallant, I’ll clear off so he can have a word without blushing.”

After a stilted bout of greeting and remarks about the weather, a battered copy of _Death in the Pot_ emerged with the usual shamefaced request for an autograph, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

Harriet, habituated through long use, took the proffered pen and asked, mostly pro forma, “Who shall I make it out to?” If he was a reader he had kept it very quiet. Mostly they harangued one about ongoing projects or for minor details about minor characters one had barely endowed with the barest outline of a personal life.

“R.R. Lanyon, thanks very much,” the boy said, and smiled. It drove away the awful secret look and left him quite plain, a fair-haired English boy out and about on a pleasant day.


End file.
